The Danville News

Robert John Andrews

Thursday, January 22, 2026

“Strength, Force, Power”

Word count:  750

 

Dear Stephen Miller:  Your condescending interview grieved me, especially given your undue influence at our White House. You lectured the journalist:  “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else.  But we live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

 

You pelt with rocks the unoffending hornet’s nest as an excuse to test out insecticide.  Your materialistic philosophy is a predictable waste.  You punish the effect you dislike while ignoring the cause crying out for redress.  Throughout the Judeo-Christian Bible, the people likewise hungered for materialistic benefits and rewards.  What the Divine Will offers instead is spiritual life, fertile ground for cultivating a worthy life.  Divine life, thus humane.  Humane, thus divine.  I’ve prayed for our White House to fulfill the role of government by having an appetite for justice. The best we likely can expect is that they must be judged.   

 

If your worldview guides our government’s threats, why would any young person enlist in the military? I urge them to delay enlisting until such time as they have a Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense intelligent and honorable enough to issue orders. Real soldiers sacrifice to end violence. 

 

My story’s been told before.  When young I pictured a life of public service beginning by enlisting in the Navy.  From there I’d study law, then enter politics.  But by then I already had heard Martin Luther King, Jr. whose testimony blesses still the America you fear:  soul force meeting physical force.  Ambitions got detoured toward the professional ministry.  I’ve described before how what clinched my call was realizing how the law can try to prevent you from lynching your neighbor but cannot help you love your neighbor. Or to paraphrase my elfish minstrel friend, Woody Wolf, in his recent YouTube inspiration decrying ICE provocations in Danville, it’s one thing to go to church, another thing to be the church.  Sing it loud.  I only would add that a reason to go to church is to learn of power, force, and strength, thus gain the guts to be church.  Our Bible rejects your America.

 

Stephen, the first fatal flaw in your worldview is how mercenary is your definition of strength, force, power.  What you crave is power to control, to scorch your will over others, to get the ends you want through domination and presumption of superiority.  Ice agents, the KKK, Christian Nationalists, and White House officials carry torches.  Those they hate radiate light.

 

Stephen, heed this Lincoln legend:  “When, at an official reception during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln referred to Southerners as erring human beings (rather than enemies worthy of extermination), an elderly Union patriot rebuked him for speaking kindly of his enemies when he ought to be thinking of destroying them. ‘Why, madam,’ Lincoln replied, ‘do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’"  Lincoln knew how to wield power.

 

Strength?  Force?  Power?  I’ve seen more strength than you could ever muster in an aged lady, riddled with arthritis, who chose to enter Grandview Nursing Home to stay beside her dying husband.  Is it wheat for bread you sow or dragon’s teeth?  Your delusion rages, for it’s upon the corpses of children such wanton evil strides.

 

The second fatal flaw in your worldview stems from your folly in ignoring history’s recurring testimony about the impracticality of strength, force, power so materialistically defined.  Golly, how well has that worked out throughout history?  How’d that work out for the Third Reich?  Tell me, who proved mightier?  Despotic Adolph and his lackeys?  Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer martyred for his faithfulness?  What about the Holy Roman Empire?  South Africa’s apartheid?   Stalin?  Putin: your turn’s coming.  Ozymandias might share poetical commentary here.  For that matter, ask Voldemort who wins? 

 

These things you fail in understanding, hence you will be remembered as Rasputin’s shadow.

 

Once upon a time in ancient Greece, Ovid wrote, King Erysichthon cut down the trees in the goddess Demeter‘s sacred grove to expand room for feasting at his palace.  Incensed by this sacrilege, the gods cursed Erysichthon with ravening hunger, forever famished.  The more he ate the hungrier he became.   With no food left, he devoured himself:  “Till finally there was nothing, nothing, only his own flesh for his greedy teeth to seize, to gnaw on, and the wretch consumed his body, feeding upon his shrinking self.”

 

I welcome your reply.